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INSTAGRAM LANDS ON ANDROID

The popular photo-sharing app, Instagram, has finally arrived for users of Google’s Android phone operating system. Originally launched for Apple’s iPhone back in 2010, it rapidly grew in popularity and hit 10 million registered users within a year. Since then, Android users have felt a bit left out. But for no longer. On the 3rd April, Instagram for Android finally arrived.

Why is it so popular? Because people like sharing photographs – the ability to capture a moment and instantly share it with an audience is a wonderful thing. Sure there are plenty of other means to do so on the internet these days, but Instagram has a charm unto itself. With a wide range of photo filters to enhance your shot and an assortment of hooks to share that picture – not just on Instagram but various other social media platforms such as Tumblr, Twitter and (of course) Facebook – it feels like a whole lot more than just another camera app.

The future of Instagram is sure to be an interesting one. With over one million Android users registering the free app within the first 24 hours of its launch, it certainly seems to have a new audience. Much to the apparent chagrin of some iPhone users who aren’t best pleased with what they had felt to be an exclusive to iPhone users’s club, being opened up to a much wider audience. And much wider it is. With sales figures of around 180 million iPhones to approximately 500 million Android based phones, Instagram has potentially opened the flood gates.

So what took Instagram so long to make its way over to Android? The company behind Instagram has a small team and apparently the same team who built and, over time, honed the iPhone version of the app also built the Android version. You also need to take into account that iPhones are all built with the same camera hardware (for each generation) whereas there are numerous different companies producing numerous different Android powered handsets with numerous different cameras in them. That’s a lot of different variables to take into consideration when striving to achieve a good quality, consistent product.